Abrisa: High-tech glass and coating company highlighted at GMSP

May 30, 2012
Santa Paula News

Abrisa Technologies is a high-tech glass firm that is “one of the well kept secrets of Santa Paula,” according to CFO Maarten Oostendorp, who addressed the Good Morning Santa Paula crowd in May.

Held at Glen Tavern Inn and catered by its Enzo’s Restaurant, the Chamber of Commerce-sponsored event featured awards and one-minute business commercials by those in attendance.

Abrisa, said Oostendorp, is “basically glass fabrication and coating owned by a private entity” in Pennsylvania. “Abrisa is a niche business, but we compete worldwide with what we do,” which, although “not particularly high-tech,” still involves extremely high-precision manufacturing.

The Santa Paula manufacturing plant fabricates the glass, “drills holes and cuts the glass to a certain shape... there are many ways you can do it and many different tolerances we can meet. We can do very tight tolerances that we pride ourselves on.”

The company handles various thicknesses of glass, used in applications and as end products ranging from lenses to lighting. “Increasingly important is glass strengthening,” achieved by heat tempering and chemical strengthening” as well as lamination.

Abrisa works with Corning on its line of Gorilla Glass for the domestic markets, but the company also does custom design of products and support, raw material distribution, glass fabrication, coatings, screen printing and optical assembly among other products and services. “Abrisa works with 700 different kinds of raw material,” and its job shop typically produces 50 to 500 units at a time.

“Glass,” noted Oostendorp, “can do everything you can imagine,” especially utilizing coating solutions devised in a laboratory setting using advanced instrumentation. Abrisa’s main market is for the military, but their customer base is also heavy on medical, display lighting, glass for solar panels that contain “efficiency boosters,” and imaging systems, among others.

Oostendorp said about 80 percent of its Santa Paula facility’s workforce live in the city. When hiring, “We look for a good attitude, we do a lot of training and take our employees from being apprentices to senior craftsmen.”

The company was founded in 1980 by Richard Selfridge, and was located in Ventura County “almost since the beginning.” Oostendorp said the plant was established in Santa Paula about 20 years ago. Jim Veler is the president/CEO of the privately held Abrisa Technologies.





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